Archive for ‘May, 2015’

One of my favorite historical trivium that I’ve learned lately: one thing museums can’t show us. Because museums are collections of stuff. But it turns out that, until the Industrial Revolution, people didn’t have any stuff. They didn’t have furniture. They didn’t have beds. They didn’t have tables. They sat on the floor or they sat on boxes. They ate with their bowl in one hand and a fork in the other.

That’s why sometimes you see old books that describe the poor of the past as “squatters and leaners.” Because you can’t sit unless you can afford a chair.

Now, how is a museum going to show you that? What kind of museum doesn’t have anything in it? Apparently an accurate one.

Here is my plan for saving America from the police and the police of America from themselves.

1. Run the Stanford Prison Experiment again, on a large scale, and get hard data on exactly how long it takes power to corrupt and in what ways it corrupts. Place the experiment on a reproducible basis. Use science to examine these sort of prison and prisoner power dynamics until the data gathered will stand up in court.

2. Use this data to challenge every single thing about our prison system. Systematically review every single criminal law in America. Submit them all to a central database and collate them.

3. Power is too corrosive to the human personality to be utilized on a daily basis. Therefore, impose stringent limits on how much a police officer can work. It should not be possible to work more than part-time as a patrol officer. Administration and detective departments should be curtailed, but their more specialized work will require longer hours.

4. Police officers should be paid enough for their 20 hours a week that they can live reasonably on that alone, and there should be few restrictions on how they work in their off hours. I’d say that right now, in 2015, $30,000 is reasonable for a part-time police officer for the year.

5. Since no one patrol officer can work more than 20 hours a week, a community that requires extra policing must hire more police. Since the job pays fairly well for relatively little work, there will be competition for the job and also mobility, as anyone who lands a good job would be able to leave it behind. This should combine to make the police force hirees mostly local citizens, mostly young people who do not have established jobs and routines.

6. Naturally any police officer, just like any American citizen, should enjoy free health care and education.

7. The police officer’s job is to bring a suspect before the court so that they may be judged. Any time they kill the suspect they fail in that duty. With this in mind, the police should be furnished with “nonlethal” weapons as much as possible. Even though nonlethal weapons can still kill, they are a massive improvement over a firearm. There is simply no excuse for any patrol officer to have hollow-point ammunition, especially when rubber bullets are available. The less lethal option should always be advocated by the department.

8. All police officers should be encouraged to take martial arts training, especially aikido.

9. High-speed pursuits are forbidden nationwide.

10. The police should not patrol. They should maintain stationary posts and respond to calls.

11. Uniforms should be easily visible and marked clearly. It should be strictly forbidden for the police to wear black. The same goes for vehicles. All police vehicles must be brightly colored and easy to find.

12. Any police officer who injures or kills a suspect will be suspended until the trial is complete.

Somebody sent me this rather amazing reply to the True Detective essay so I thought I’d repost it here and answer at length.

We began by discussing the Notre Dame line in TD, which he takes to be very important, because of Rust’s attraction to places of great ritual significance.

The Paris connection is there for anyone who reads Chambers. It isn’t entirely easy to discern, but it is there.

You are correct about it being Notre Dame. Why is this significant? Well for starters it is well known for its Gothic architecture and the Naturalism of its sculptures and stained glass. Naturalism in the arts is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, implausible, exotic and supernatural elements. Realist works of art may emphasize the ugly or sordid, and deals with the accurate depiction of lifeforms, perspective, and the details of light and color. This is contrasted and a reaction to Romanticism which emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe. Romanticism revived elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism.

So what you are probably asking. Well, Rust and Marty fit this descriptive contrast. Marty and Rust, Hart and Cohle, or “Heart and Soul”. Marty is all emotion and sentimental. Rust is his opposite introspective and introverted. The way each makes sense of the world have obvious parallels to naturalism and romanticism. And the reason neither could find the clue that was right under their noses was because Rust excluded the supernatural at first and Marty tried to escape the progress of of not only his own life, but all life as represented by the growth of industry, population and urban sprawl. If he doesn’t look down, he can see 40…

The cathedral treasury is notable for its reliquary which houses some of Catholicism’s most important first-class relics including the purported Crown of Thorns, a fragment of the True Cross, and one of the Holy Nails. The connection here to Rust is obvious. He was the sacrifice. He pondered the nature of accepting that by placing a cross above his bed even though he himself didn’t believe in the supernatural explanation for it. Time is a flat circle, so there is reason to believe Rust was pondering this before we ever see him in the show. Symbolically speaking, a relic is something that has survived the passage of time.

The suicide you mention may have a possible connection as well. The suicide note contained messages concerning the destruction of a way of life, the problems of decadence, and the dissolution of the nuclear family. These themes have an obvious connection to many in True Detective. Perhaps RUst went to the church to kill himself and found he “lacked the constitution for suicide” as he tells Marty.

The North Transept ROse is beautiful stained glass. It also looks remarkably similar to the vortex seen in the finale.

Here is where it gets interesting. The position of titular organist (“head” or “chief” organist) at Notre-Dame is considered one of the most prestigious organist posts in France and the world over. Chambers
wrote of an organ player, or something far more sinister disguised as an organ player. Chambers short story “In the Court of the Dragon” involves a narrator who seeks refuge in a church in France called St Barnabus. Overcome by an unknown fear, he is offended and angered by the Organist’s playing, which nobody else seems to notice. He mistakes the exit of the organ player and assumes this was a mistake in the way he measured the passage of time. He interprets the organ players look as one of hatred, and notices that others in the church are looking at him the same way. He leaves, making his escape back home but realizes he is being followed by the organ player. He decides struggling is pointless and awakens back in the church, deciding it was a dream. He realizes he knew the organ player all along as death or a messenger or deliver of death and realizes he is disguised to everyone else eyes but his own. The church disappears and he finds himself on the shore of the lake of Hali (which runs up into Carcosa in other stories and is mentioned in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos). The story ends with the character dying, and it reads, “Then death seemingly comes, “And now I heard his voice, rising, swelling, thundering through the flaring light, and as I fell, the radiance increasing, increasing, poured over me in waves of flame. Then I sank into the depths, and I heard the King in Yellow whispering to my soul: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!”.

So what can we make of this? Here we see, **poured over me in waves of flame**, like we see Rust in the introduction to the show each week. The **flaring light** also reminded me of the shot you linked of Marty on the phone when he calls his mistress. The story ends with “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”. How does one fall into those hands? Suffering, sin, punishing oneself ( ever the control freak, Rust struggled with blaming himself for his daughter’s death), eroding defenses by drug and alcohol abuse? All of the above? I think the important thing is that at some point during Rust’s visit to France, he attracted the attention of the Yellow KIng (or his followers or more symbolically, death and madness), just like the main character in this story. The yellow King (or his followers or more symbolically death and madness) has been following him since. An interesting relation and perhaps a less obvious resource for the writers of the show, St Barnabus was a church in Carcosa in Neal Wilgus’ story “The Rest of Your Life” where the congregants chanted “have you seen the yellow sign” over and over just like they did in Chamber’s “The Yellow Sign” where the Church Watchmen and unnamed others chanted, “Have you found the yellow sign”?. Interestingly, in that story which also takes place in France, a man walks alone in the night and finds the streets abandoned, except for a figure on a church’s steps. When he sees the figure he is overcome with anger and confusion, and is compelled to hatred and violence, the same way the protagonist was in “The COurt of the Dragon” when hearing the organists music. And just like the protagonist in that story, this one is also pursued by death who is in the service of the Yellow King. Worth noting is the fact that both antagonists were uncovered in churchs. It would seem that the Yellow King and his servants evidently hide behind the cloak of religion…

I could make other connections but for now, that is the best I have to offer. I do have some questions though and would like to pick your mind!

Awrite!

First, what are your thoughts on the mask? Childress says” Take off your mask”. I can make several connections to Chambers, Maupassant, and Poe, among others, but I don’t have a grasp yet on what was being said and why.

The second Childress says that he’s screwed, because Rust wears no mask.

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed it’s time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

Rush “knows who he really is.” He’s the exact opposite of Childress, who is nothing but mask upon mask — he never even talks the same way twice. This makes him the Monster at the End of the Book for Childress.

This is another reason why I think Pizzolatto read House of Leaves — the awareness that, to the minotaur, Theseus is the monster.

And then he “uses his head,” by headbutting Childress.

Second, have you noticed the way sex is shown with the main characters? Marty, a slave to his emotions, is on bottom with both mistresses (and bound by one of them) while Rust, ever vigilant to not lose control as you pointed out in your essay, mounts Maggie from behind? The closest we see to two character making love, we get a quick shot of missionary before the shot fades away. What are your thoughts on this and do you think it is significant?

No, I never noticed it, and yes, it’s definitely significant. I think it’s part of Marty’s essential immaturity that he always wants to be punished — he’s a Bad Boy. It’s deeper than that, though. There’s a lot of stuff about the job of policing and the police department that goes unnoticed, but Rust and Marty are shown to be thoroughly bad rotten no-good cops who abuse their power in every conceivable way. Marty likes to be handcuffed because he knows he deserves it.

What happened between Rust and Maggie barely qualifies as sex. It’s more like some weird ritual.

Third, when Rust goes to the payphone to look for clues about who called the prisoner that killed himself after promising to tell of the yellow King, did you notice the lone yellow Lilly? Rust looks right at it. What is your take on this?

No, I did not notice that, but it’s a really interesting point as well. Does that happen before or after the scene in the sanitarium? Maybe by that point Rust understands that the flowers mean that he missed something….

Lastly, you seem to hint in your essay that you don’t buy into any type of larger conspiracy in the storyline. What are your thought on the elder Tuttle moving from governor (local) to senator(senator)? What was the purpose of the cultlike activities being covered up? Do you have any thoughts on the theoretical idea of a psychosphere? And do you think Rev Tuttle meant something more when he said, “There is a war going on behind the scenes”?

I bet he did! There are a few things that he could have meant there. One interesting point for me, and something that I think Pizzolatto was talking about in the series, is that there were a LOT of powerful-people-running-child-pornography rings that were discovered and rolled up in the early 1990s. The most famous are of course Louisiana and Omaha (the Aksarben scandal), but there were also ones in Austin Texas (the Kallisted ring) Seattle Washington (whatever was going on with the orphanages), Belgium, and of course the Catholic Church. I think I remember others as well.

I think that local businessmen running sex rings was a very common byproduct of the Western system until the 1990s, when some essential tipping point was reached and they were all (most? Some?) wrapped up and brought down. I think this is one of the main things TD is about.

That might be what he meant, or he might mean the impulse of good and evil, or he might just be talking about power in general.

As to a conspiracy, obviously the Tuttles are related. What I meant is that no grand manipulator was abusing Marty’s daughters just in case he was some day assigned to a case, and the woman in the Fox and the Hound is not a spy. As a matter of fact, she’s probably a direct outgrowth of a character in NYPD Season 2 episode 21. A whole lot of this show comes from NYPD Blue. For example, lighting the cigarette and being told to put it out in the very first scene with Rust.

But I digress. What I meant is that there are conspiracies but they are not magical or all-powerful, and they are not behind every single thing that happens in the story. I don’t think Papania or Gilbough are in on it, for example. I’m sorta hoping to see them again.

History is a chamber of horrors, and it stretches back as far as you care to see.

The only purpose history serves is to inspire particularly brutal fiction and to remind us of the hell that far too many people are still trapped in today.

The Knick knows.

In case you haven’t heard of this show, let me tell you about the Knick. It is Deadwood + ER. This is what they wanted to make, this is what they made, this is what I wanted, and that is what I got.

No complaints.

Now that TV shows are evolving into long movies, you’re getting prestige projects from quality directors. Everybody knows about Top of the Lake, which was Jane Campion with True Detective‘s visual team. Nobody watched it, because it just wasn’t that exciting.

Amazing light on boring people.

Prestige directors, everybody. Now Steven Soderbergh, who is one of those names that you and I should probably know, is doing prestige period TV about a doctor in New York City in the year 1907. And since it’s done correctly, it’s brutal as can be.

Interesting choice of words there, though. “Can be.”

Because we can’t really tell the truth. We can’t even get our minds around the truth. And that’s true in so many ways that we can’t even count them.

One horror of history that’s hard to show is that some people liked it. And I don’t mean just the big white illiterate bearded male bullies, the reliable bad guys for every period piece from now on forever, usually Irish.

And some of my best friends are Irish.

In real life there have always been people of every race creed and color who like things the way they are, even when the way they are is really quite bad, and from the modern point of view that’s creepy as hell.

You can do a movie about persecution in the ghetto of Warsaw but you can’t really show the scariest truth, which is the sweet little Jewish kid who thinks its great. You can’t show the slaves who were in favor of slavery, the women who thought women should stay in the kitchen, the gay people who thought they were better off in the closet, the jews who thought the Nazis had something to say. It’s scary as hell to even consider that they existed.

I don’t mean the creepy moneychangers at the beginning of the Pianist, either.

This makes perfect sense.

Those guys, we can understand. They’re just selfish scum. It’s just evil.

What we can’t understand is the person who isn’t evil, just plain old wrong. The person who honestly votes against their own interests. Even though we’re American, we’re surrounded by them, we still can’t quite imagine it. Even though we all have that great grand-aunt who is just fine as long as you don’t get her started talking about Hitler, we can’t understand how somebody can be a perfect and wonderful human being from one angle and just accidentally and incidentally the literal face of evil from another. It’s hard to understand how an intelligent and sensitive human being can be that wrong.

The truth is that the human need to pick a side is stronger than the human need for self-preservation, and that produces weird results. The literal and historical truth is that there were slaves that fought for the Confederacy. Not many, but that’s the point. However many there were, we’ll never know, because they are invisible to fiction.

They can only be recorded in the driest of academic literature. Let’s say there was a slave who fought for the Confederacy. Let’s say he fought heroically.

Nobody’s ever gonna make a movie about him.

If you ever want you and your entire family to disappear, from all human hearts and myth, then all you have to do is betray your cultural affinity group and pick the wrong side of history. Presto change-o, in a hundred short years no one will be able to bear to think about you.

Because nobody likes an Uncle Tom.

So we’ve established that, when recreating the past, there’s at least one thing we can’t say. We can’t deal with the fact that good and decent people were completely and utterly wrong. By modern standards, by enlightened standards, by any standard you can name, they were wrong. And maybe they should have known better!

But the fact is, they didn’t!

That’s a problem for modern viewers, because we, the audience, need people to root for. We can’t handle people who are good people but honestly think that gay people should be lobotomized. Even though people really used to think that, we can’t deal with it. We know that the past was entirely populated by people who are, from our modern perspective, Bad Guys. We need good guys, and that means good guys by OUR standards.

Deadwood, the first of the the modern forays into the past, solved this problem brilliantly by making the doctor the modern good guy. And making him a drunk.

The Doctor is in.

As a doctor with a drinking problem he is the perfect vehicle to view the suffering past. He has a flaw that we can understand, and the insulation of alcohol explains why he doesn’t go insane every time he sees somebody beat a starving child. He’s sensitive, he’s like us, and so he drinks.

However, he’s a completely unhistorical character. He’s practically a saint by the standards of the day. He just goes around doing good and being right about everything. It works because everybody else on that show was so busy being profoundly flawed that he didn’t get much screen time.

Great solution!

But obviously not going to work in a show about doctors.

Today We Are Removing The Appendix

So we begin with the appendix. The Knick, Episode 7, “Get the Rope.” The race riot episode, the episode in which the dark cancer at the heart of the American dream is identified and symbolically excised.

From darkness

to light

a snappy fella emerges

GENTLEMEN

Ladies and gentlemen, the appendix is a part of the body that is just super cool and nifty.

It’s your own personal intestinal panic room.

Basically you, yourself, the person who is reading these words right now, you are carrying around a gutful of good and helpful bacteria, productive citizens in the nation of You. Sometimes shit goes awry, literally in this case, and bad bacteria get up in your gut-pouch and sort of put your helpful citizens to fire and the sword. It sucks for everybody, especially you, because you get sick as hell. When the Intestinal Vikings invade, the good citizens of your gut take what they can carry and retreat to their castle on the hill, which is your appendix.

One assumes there is some sort of selection process, where the most “valuable” bacteria are saved. Valuable to who? Something inside you decides.

There is a man like this living inside your belly.

Now, sometimes your inner Dr. Strangelove goes astray and lets bad bacteria in, and the global thermonuclear war in your gut gets into your own personal intestinal panic room, your appendix. Then all hell breaks loose and the appendix gets infected and you can plan on dying if somebody doesn’t get that appendix out.

So, for most of history, you would just die, and if somebody bothered to cut open your body (or maybe wolves ate part of it, the past was rough) they would see your appendix sticking out like a big black finger. So fatal appendicitis was the only way that presurgical cultures knew the appendix at all, because the organ only works when something’s wrong.

If you don’t know what you’re looking at, you can confuse the fire department with the fire, and they didn’t know what they were looking at. They decided that since appendicitis and the appendix were always found together, the appendix was just bad. It was an evolutionary atavism, it had no place in the body, we were better off without it. It got to where surgeons would just pro-actively clip it off if they happened to have the torso open for anything else. Thus dooming their poor client-victim to a lifetime of greater digestive upset, but that’s another story.

The appendix is the perfect symbol for the doctors of this show and the medicine of this time. Because removing the appendix was tricky and difficult and required great knowledge and was still the wrong thing to do and should not have been done but they did it anyway because of their fundamentally flawed and limited view of the world. Perfect! They don’t know what the appendix is, they don’t know what it does, they misunderstand it completely, but they do learn how to take it out when it is a matter of life and death, and that’s better than nothing. When the chips are down they’re better than nothing. That’s the best the past can give you.

So if ya just poke ‘em right here…

This thing pops out!

Fifty percent of the time, it works every time!

Whoa, your way sounds better.

“My god, look at that handsome young genius. He reminds me of me.”

Wait, what?

?

Oh, that’s right, I was having an opium dream.

Our hero, moustache doctor Thackery, is chasing the dragon in Chinatown, because the price for any sensitive modern man trapped in the past is drug addiction and tawdry sex. Opium addiction is perfect, because

1. You get to hang out with Chinese people and prove that you are not racist.
2. That’s what David Milch did in Deadwood.

So Thackerey doesn’t smoke the wackery tobaccary. But he does wake up from his opium reverie (dream? Memory? If you ever watch the show, my money is on memory, because the show is pretty funny and later old Thack really does go into a cocaine frenzy and he accidentally does kill a patient or two, but having him cut somebody open and pull out the wrong tube because of an operation he came up with in an opium hallucination is too funny even for this show), and he does have to partake in some hackneyed chicanery.

There’s this guy and he’s choking on something or something.

Thack cleans his surgical instruments in pure symbol.

Tracheotomies are the surgery most convenient to television, so they’re the surgery we see the most.

“Load up his bowl, he’s going to need something for the pain. ……………And, er, could you load up one for me?”

Note the prestige lettering on the titles. Since this is a prestige show, I bet if if you watch that last scene over and over again there’s even an explanation somewhere why that guy needed a tracheotomy.

Democracy As Zombie Movie

The before-credits scene is there to set up the modus operandi for the whole episode. A short moral situation is presented — a man lies in sin, dreaming ineffectually of greatness. He is awakened at a time of need and puts aside vice to act heroically, but his lapse back into sin is almost immediate. And now we see a longer version of the same thing. The symbolic machine of the episode has been established — you have this story, it is a machine that runs on the raw fuel of your attention and filters it through a parable called THE KNICK, which produces desired artistic (and hopefully moral) results. You’re supposed to watch the Knick and Learn Something About The Past and go forth and sin no more or at least slightly less.

So, now that we turned on the Moustache Machine, what situation shall we apply to our imaginary Doctor Thackery?

Meanwhile, on the poorly-lit side of town.

Note the dog, the completely darkened figures, the only light through the door. There are three people in that shot and you can’t see any of them. They’re carefully dressed in background colors.

Film only works by recording light, and this has led to problems in the past because it’s hard to show who’s rich and who’s poor sometimes. A mud shack will look wonderful in wonderful light and a mansion will look like crap in bad light. Soderbergh knows that if you want to make a place look run-down, take any old place and film it in the dark.

Ah, so race is the issue of the day. Black bodies, black skin.

That is our flawless hero doctor who has been carefully persecuted over the last six episodes because of the color of his skin, and the color of his skin shall be the lesson of the day.

Because he is a black character he has to be better than all the other characters so he is better than everybody, he’s every bit as good a surgeon as Thackery but instead of being mean he’s nice and instead of taking opium he’s a boxer who beats up people when the episode’s going slow.

He’s a bit of a Mary Sue.

But that’s okay, because it makes the story run smoother. No audience member less meta-critical than yours truly could possibly have a problem with this guy, not unless they were racist or something, and the characters who are racist against him will meet a gruesome fate. We’ll get to that.

If you ever want to make someone look hesitant, stand them next to a giant sign that says ER.

Also funny because this guy’s about to go to the E. R. Film can be the art of telegraphing punches sometimes.

Because here’s what he sees:

Can you find where in this picture the director wants you to look?

I’ll tell you the truth; I despise this scene. It’s too heavy-handed to ever be historical. What they’re trying to present here is a scene where two people interact politely, but one of the people is as wrong as can be — so crazy wrong as to be evil. Which is accurate, and a good picture of how we should interpret the past.

But look at this. Nothing in the past, nothing in life was ever this neat and simple. Look at the streets. There’s no horseshit, no newspapers blowing around. It’s supposed to be sweltering hot but nobody sweats. The past didn’t look like this: go to shorpy.com and edjumacate, this was 1907 and we know what 1907 looked like. There was litter everywhere. Brightly colored trash is an unmistakable sign of human life.

Anyway, the cop has been established as an extremely polite and incredibly dirty cop. He walks over and tries to solicit that woman to work for him as a prostitute, and she is outraged.

She calls upon her boyfriend to elucidate her lack of interest.

The racial slurs are carefully staged on a path of escalation. The cop calls her a “dark one,” then her boyfriend calls him “Paddy,” then he retorts.

Gotta admit this is an excellent photograph of a man who’s about to get his ass handed to him.

In less time than it takes you to read this sentence the cop’s been stabbed in the gut and left lying dying on the street.

Well. That escalated quickly.

Oh, those Irish people, always judging people by their ancestry, ha ha not like us, ho no.

It’s of technical interest that they keep changing which racial slurs that they use. I think the past was maybe like that, but you probably had a lot of people who just repeated the same one a lot.

So once the word gets out that a cop has been stabbed by a black person, even though he was carefully stabbed in such a way that no modern audience could reasonably object, these wacky paststers booze up and riot.

These horrors of democracy are given the most disrespectful treatment that they can be given on TV — they are dressed up like a zombie movie.

It is a historical fact that there were mobs of racists back in the day who did racist shit. But we don’t really want to get into detail about what they sounded like, because that would mean some screenwriter would have to spend hours writing really racist crap into a script, and then the actors would have to repeat it until they got it right, and then the sound editors have to record it and edit it, and the editors and the directors have to listen to it a million times — it’s unpleasant for everybody. We don’t really want to hear what lynch mobs have to say. So they don’t get any faces, they don’t get any names, they don’t get any identifiable dialogue. They are only glimpsed through windows, which, just like zombies, they are somehow too stupid to break through.

Meanwhile, the doctor who is racist is returning from looking after his wife. His wife is his punishment for being racist, she is crazy and some really entertainingly horrible things happen to her. I forget whether or not that doctor learns racism is wrong in this season or if they’re saving that. But he returns and two things happen:

As the racist doctor walks to work…

He is suddenly and perfectly overlapped by this character, who entered from the right.

They walk as one for one second.

Then come apart again.

Not an accident. This is visual foreshadowing — the doctor is in the process of learning Racism is Wrong, but she is fated to be the next to learn. A slightly more complex lesson is in store for her. We won’t get to it this episode.

Next, this:

Cliche deployed for purely historical interest I am sure.

Nurse Elkins learns that not being racist about patting sweat off the heads of doctors is important.

Racist doctor makes racist faces so you can still enjoy what’s going to happen to his wife.

They can’t save the racist cop. He dies in a fairly well choreographed scene that you will enjoy if you actually watch the episode instead of just reading about it on the Internet.

Racist Mom of Racist Cop can’t handle it.

She goes on a bit of a rant.

There’s a serious problem with the language of the past. Deadwood had this exact problem, because originally those characters were supposed to talk in period language. They were going to yell and scream and curse exactly like the real people of the day.

The problem is that the people of the day sounded exactly like Yosemite Sam. They really did say “great horny toads” and “Blast!”

Imagine, if you will, Al Swearingen talking, like he really did, with the most vile and fearsome oaths, language that would make a lady up and fucking die:

Zounds!

So any time you’re writing about the past, you’re translating. Because the proper translation of “Zounds” is not “God’s wounds,” it’s “Holy shit!!”

There was nobody in the whole past who spoke the same English as you’re reading today, and everything you read is a translation, whether you know it or not.

People used words then that are terrible today. And we gotta deal with that. The n-bomb is the serious one, but I’ll point out that “retard,” recently promoted to utterly unsayable, is actually an old euphemism. It’s a French word that means “late.”

We are not prepared, as a society, to deal with how racist the people in the past were. We don’t even have a good way to understand how our concept of racism applied to them. It’s very carefully introduced here. The gruff-but-good-hearted ambulance driver is more archaic than offensive. The Irish lady, on the other hand, cuts loose, and it’s one of the things that I like about this episode that they pick her as the real villain. This episode is a zombie movie, and she is the evil lady who lets out the zombies.

Zombie movies are about a well-justified fear of democracy. Zombies are the mob. They are just like us, except stupid. They can’t even get through a glass door. There’s nothing that special about us, the survivors, but at least we aren’t them.

This episode is a zombie movie. A moral aberration is illustrated and then all the proper people are eaten. Combatants appear and disappear and do not speak. The Irish lady is the witch who looses the forces of unreason.

The cop does not think that maybe she should be saying all these terrible things.

You know exactly where this is going. Exactly as much chaos as the film crew can afford.

Doctor Moustache heroically stands and pushes.

It is significant that practically none of the black victims of the race riot have any dialogue at all.

Zombie movie.

There’s a rather boring visual metaphor about rope that justifies the title of the episode without actually requiring the depiction of a lynching.

What’s the point of this? What’s the point of making an episode about lynching and then not showing a lynching, but a visual pun? Slyly winking does not make sense here.

I know the answer, and it is “economy.” They want to say much bigger things than they’re willing to take the time to say, so they settle for hyperlinking.

And yes, this is a problem that could be solved with a bigger budget, but it is also a problem that could be solved with better writing.

At the end of the day, the whole gang achieves racial synthesis, but in such a way that plot lines are left open for the next episode. One guy will stay racist and be punished for it. One woman will overcome racism and get laid. We will all learn a valuable lesson.

To be more precise, we all learned that lesson a long time ago, but this show provides a comforting reminder.

And some helpful facts along the way. Did you know that surgical suction was invented in approximately the time period of this show?

What will science suck on next?

Call me cynical, but nobody is going to watch this show and decide to not be racist anymore. That isn’t the way advertising works. Advertising is crap for gaining converts; it works to remind the people who are already into it to go out and do more with it. Nobody ever learned for the first time that pizza existed from a coupon, but plenty people see a pizza coupon and decide to get some.

This show is advertising not being racist and learning about the past. It is not the sort of show that will win you over to that; it isn’t that sort of inspirational, it does not work as a bridge. However, if you are already into trying to not be racist and learning about the past, then this show will comfortably expand your body of knowledge without overtaxing you. It is comfortable fiction. All the surprises come at the expected time.

After meditating deeply upon Robocop, I now understand the source of the problem that the Koran has with the Jews.

While I was trying to make Robocop 2: the Story of Mohammed, I read the Koran. Well, the first third of it. Then my daughter sat on my kindle and broke it. But in that time I learned a lot of things.

The Koran is structurally completely different from the Bible, and it does not involve the adventures of Mohammed (my original idea for the sequel). In fact, it’s all about Jesus.

Apologies to anyone who’s read this before, I’ve been talking about this for a long time.

Anyway, the proper interpretation of Robocop 2, according to the Koran, would not be about Mohammed. Mohammed would not even appear. In fact, the work would be about Jesus, again, but from a more distant point of view. It would essentially be an MMORPG in which a wide variety of players follow behind Robocop and do His paperwork.

Upon realizing this, I saw that this represents a fundamental shift in point of view toward Jesus, and there is a structural flaw in there that’s expressed in the Koran.

Because the Koran is really super mean to jews. Basically every criticism you’ve ever read about the Koran is completely baseless, from the thing about the dogs to the thing about the 72 virgins to the thing about the jihads, but it is true that the Koran has a problem with jews. It’s annoying, when you read it, but if you can handle Jesus going on and on about divorced people in the New Testament or Paul whining about the gays, you can handle it. Ancient religious texts have weird things in them. Comes with the territory.

But I did wonder why that was, and Robocop 2: the MMORPG showed me!

Because in the first Robocop, Jesus has to fight many people — the Jews, the Romans, the Pharisees, etc. Since he is personally interacting with all these people, they get a lot of attention. They are shown to be disparate individuals with disparate motives.

However, if you are playing Robocop 2: the MMORPG, you are not interacting with the enemies of Robocop. They are all dead, and you are moving in his wake, setting up security cameras and repairing bullet holes and processing suspects and doing side quests. Although you are dealing more directly with the realities of the world than Robocop is (and the Koran is a much more realistic book in its expectations than the Bible), all opposition has already been vanquished, and you are at a remove from the enemies of the Divine One. You understand literally everything about the world except for the Opposition.

In other words, since Robocop is at the other end of the screen killing His enemies, you don’t get to know His enemies.

The crooks, the criminals, the bad executives, the thugs, traitors, the low-lives, the lost and the simply unlucky all merge to your point of view. They are simply Those Who Opposed.

The Koran is about Jesus, but it was written six hundred years later. They couldn’t see that there were complexities and crossing interests. They could only see that Jesus was opposed by the Jews.

Mexico! South Padre Island! Pictures coming soon, I’ve never been this far south before.

And for our next trick, we rocket clear to the other side of I-35 for Springcon in Minneapolis/St. Paul, a grand pilgrimage taken every year to honor the spirit of comic books, spring, and general getting out of the house. Gewel will be showing art at Art-A-Whirl at Turbo Tim’s and I’ll be selling comic books at Springcon and everything’s gonna be great.

Gewel’s first art show since this last semester. Pictures of that coming soon too, you better believe.

David Milch was right. Our culture is amping up to kill a lot of Muslims.

David Milch is right about everything.

I love David Milch.

But that’s not the point. The point is, don’t tolerate Islamophobia, kids. Don’t put up with that shit around you. Because this is where it starts. Making it clear now that making shitty jokes or fucking evil generalizations about muslims is like making them about jews, or black people, or women, or anybody.

Because they’re just anybody. They’re just people. They don’t deserve your hatred for any reason at all.

So don’t let people do it. When somebody says, “but all muslims are pedophiles,” do the world a favor and shut them the fuck down.

I don’t care if you style yourself some sort of “critic of Islam,” I guess that’s a reasonable way to spend your day. But you’re not a critic of anything if you’re just a fucking liar.